Last couple of months has been dramatic and there is a huge demand for ethical and safe social media. Even mainstream conservatives start to look for alternatives when US oligarchs wage hybrid warfare against their nation.
And there are so many low hanging fruits right now. Like Facebook event and marketplace replacements on the fediverse. Or just a Facebook alternative that isn’t Frendica. Or maybe a commercial fork of Frendica.
I’m not involved in any development of fediverse software, so I’m asking here. Do you experience more interest from venture capital?
Also, I assume EU will pour big money into social media alternatives, starting 2025.
Note: I’m not interested in a discussion regarding if VC is good or bad for the fediverse. That’s a good topic for another post though.
How would you make money if you can’t control the platform? Investing in the fediverse is a terrible investment case.
How can you make money of the internet if you don’t own all infrastructure and control all standards? I promise, there are countless businesses cases.
There is a non-negligible amount of companies making money out of services based on email, even though they don’t own email as a standard.
Also, remember when VCs were giving money to every “Uber for X” pitch deck some years ago? If ActivityPub ever manages to cement itself as ubiquitous standard, you can bet that we’ll see investors going after anyone saying “LinkedIn, but on ActivityPub”, “Tinder, but on ActivityPub”, “Etsy, but on ActivityPub”, “Patreon, but on ActivityPub”, “Yelp, but on ActivityPub”, “Github, but on ActivityPub”…
Exactly. And there are countless of popular open source projects which are funded by VC. Many of which I have no idea how they plan to make money. Astral (the creator of ruff and uv) is one recent example.
Just say that you use Rust and AI, and the VC will come.
We are getting off-topic, but to me it seems clear that they are trying to become to the Python world what npm became to Javascript?
Yeah, maybe that was a bad example. I believe my point is that if the quality of the product and/or the number of users is large enough, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have a viable business plan yet.
The big risk when it comes to the fediverse is that it still is so small that big tech could just highjack the whole thing, and it wouldn’t even be a bullet on the weekly board agenda. I.e. it’s still pocket money we’re taking about.
You can control the platform, so long as “the platform” means only your own instance. I have tabs open right now to both reddit.com and discuss.tchncs.de and the only difference as far as “control” is concerned is that here I can read posts by users, and from communities, that are registered elsewhere than discuss.tchncs.de too, the operators of the latter still otherwise have the same “control” as those as of reddit.
Hm, they have control over the instance but not directly (except if they fork etc) over the software? So comparing to reddit they can’t modify the UI to include ads, can’t inject tracking, etc.